The tenth annual Trading Agent Competition was completed earlier this month at the IJCAI-09 conference in Pasadena, California. TAC-09 featured three games: the supply chain management (SCM), market design (reverse TAC, or “CAT”), and Ad Auction (AA) games. Preliminary rounds began in June, involving 42 teams (13 in SCM, 14 in CAT, and 15 in the new AA game) from 14 countries. A full list of participating teams is available.
Based on the qualifying and seeding rounds, the 14 CAT agents, 15 AA agents, and 12 of the SCM agents proceeded to the final tournament, on 13–14 July. The first day (semifinals) coincided with the Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA-09), where researchers presented their latest results on trading agent technology.
The competition was as always an exciting event. Although the table below lists only the top-scoring few agents for each game, many entries exhibited strong trading strategy. Complete SCM-09 score tables are also available.
|CAT||1 Jackaroo||University of Western Sidney|
|2 CUNY.CS||City University of New York|
|3 IAMwildCAT||University of Southampton|
|SCM||1 Deep Maize||University of Michigan|
|2 TacTex||University of Texas|
|3 MinneTAC||University of Minnesota|
|Ad Auction||1 TacTex||University of Texas|
|2 AstonTAC||Aston University|
|3 Schlemazl||Brown University|
A few articles and other descriptions of TAC-09 agents are currently available. We will post additional reports as the participants provide post-tournament agent descriptions and analyses.
TAC-09 would like to thank our bronze sponsor, Advanced Technologies Integration, Inc.
The University of Michigan also acknowledges the generous support of Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google enabling the production of the TAC Ad Auctions game.